Trump rides economic shit storm to victory

Just awoke to a Trump presidency, angry feminists and delighted veterans.

My take?

This was never a traditional election. It was a referendum on a corrupt political establishment, which gave the faltering middle class no other way to vote against the multinationals consuming us like flesh-eating bacteria.

The GOP could have run a fudge brownie against Hillary Rodham Clinton and won on the back of the systemic corruption, job destruction, neutered news media, and corporate greed embraced by the political caste she embodies. Instead, Republican politicos won a pyrrhic victory behind an opportunistic man they neither control nor like.

The faltering middle class wanted change, but was given no option but a wealthy outsider named Donald Trump. So they held their collective nose and voted against Hillary and for the silver spoon.

Why?

Because t

he 1 Percent tried to defend the status quo by submarining the only legitimate agent for change in either party in Bernie Sanders. Just as they did with the Brexit vote.

Democrats could have run the table behind Sanders.

However, instead of change we got Trump. It’s not clear what that means beyond the end of Obamacare and the pathway to a national medical system it represented.

The end of Obamacare is a victory for the overpaid members of the American Medical Association, health insurers, and their friends in the 1 Percent. Not the faltering middle class.

Trump could be a dictator, a crook, or the sweeping change needed to remove the rot in the American social fiber. There’s no way to know yet. The 70-year-old is too old to make it as a dictator, especially in a nation that would take decades to transform into the kind of place a despot could rule. Adolf Hitler was 44 when he rose to power. Benito Mussolini was 39.

We’ll get an early indication of who Trump plans to be in his treatment of Hillary. The billionaire developer vowed to throw the icon of the political class in prison after the election. If he follows through when he assumes office Jan. 20, look out.

It’s on.

If not, we’ve probably got a financial opportunist on our hands. That’s something the crooks in Congress and their friends on Wall Street can live with. The Dems and Republicans have the votes to impeach him at will if they work together and their paymasters have the money to buy him off if that’s all Trump is really about.

Either way, the biggest winners in this election are the dying supremacist groups which were tossed into the mix by the-ends-justifies-the-means crowd on both sides of the political aisle.

The Davos globalization folks have demonized those who oppose their version of a global economy with no labor regulations and no real world government but themselves. They tarred their opponents as group supremacists when Britian voted to exit the European Union and did so again in the 2016 presidential election.

Re-energizing marginalized supremacist groups when

they lost. Both times.

Personally, I’ve been laid off twice since 2009 and I wanted to vote against the Wall Street sonsabitches who put me out of work. Like so many other principled liberals and progressives.

Fighting back against monied interests was more important to me than whether a candidate had internal or external genitalia. I took a lot of grief for it from Hillary Clinton supporters who wrapped themselves in the vagina flag.

I supported Bernie Sanders in the primary but found both Hillary and Trump unpalatable in the general election. So I voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein instead.

I don’t know from personal experience, but I’m pretty sure she’s female. Might even have a vagina.

Stein wound up with about 1 percent of the vote. Hillary and Trump both got about 48 Percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson came away with just 3 Percent.The real question is how the corrupt political class in DC ever became so arrogant, greedy, stupid and insulated from reality. Same things times two for their paymasters among the predatory hedge-funds and private equity funds of Wall Street.

We’re taking about a Clinton family that accrued an incredible $153 million in bribes from the big banks carving up the middle class from 2001 to 2014, in what may be the worst example of political corruption in U.S. history. The two lawyers made these protection payments legal by reclassifying them as “speaking fees.”

Only a fucking moron would think a member of such a crooked duo was even remotely electable. Or a sheltered member of the 1 Percent and their well paid lackeys in the 10 Percent.

The same arrogant Democratic Party is home to a Senate Minority leader in Nancy Pelosi who built an $89 million fortune largely on insider trading tips from her friends in the multinational corporate world.

This kind of elitist garbage is commonplace on both sides of the aisle in a hated Congress that has exempted itself from insider trading prohibitions and term limits, and made it a crime to protest against them. A Congress whose 11 Percent approval rating is among the lowest in U.S. history.

Surely, these fools had to know their “Come to Jesus moment” was in the wind.

This was never just an election pitting the Democrats against Republicans. It was a referendum on economic monarchy, political corruption, the global caste system, the rising police state, a permanent political upper class, corporate greed, off-shoring and multinationals. In short, it was a vote against the so-called “Masters of the Universe” who have impoverished the rest of us with their unsustainable avarice and hubris while establishing themselves as the orb’s new kings and queens.

It was a referendum on an entire generation of failed “leaders” which does not know how to lead by example.

Decent working people were voting against this garbage when they voted against Hillary Clinton. Not for someone who has never done a real day of work in their life.

This election would have been a huge win for the 99 Percent with a genuine populist like Bernie Sanders as the standard bearer. The consequences are less clear with a Reality TV Star who wasn’t even trying to win until the last month or so, when Trump began running messages denigrating the corrupt elites in DC. People who are his friends, classmates, peers, business partners and neighbors.

Hillary focused on traditional victim groups, but largely ignored the suffering of working class whites. She said almost nothing about the 22 veterans now taking their lives each day versus a death rate of 0.8 a day at the height of combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. They matter to me.

Hillary sad almost nothing about the 22 percent increase in suicides among middle aged whites since 1999. They matter, too.

She said almost nothing about the boarded up Main Streets that abound in the areas she and her fellow elites call “Flyover Country” and “The Rustbelt.”

And she lost because of it. Giving us four years of a silver spoon conman named Donald Trump.

To quote Saint Theresa of Avila: “More tears have been shed over prayers granted than ignored.”

What’s next?

Who knows?

That’s up to Trump.

If all this modern day PT Barnum wants is another revenue stream he’s in a position to sell a lot of votes. The big banks are no doubt peppering his front door right now with bales of cash waiting to be relabeled as “speaking fees.” We’ll see if he can resist the temptation.

The one thing I do know is that we’re going to see a lot of political outsiders running for office in the next few year in the wake of this election

Their platform?

Being against everything this failed generation of political and business elites stand for.

Let’s just hope they can separate the economic populism from the group bias embraced by both Hillary and Trump. The vast majority of his supporters were never the so-called “deplorables” she painted them to be.

Most Trump supporters were just Americans of modest means who had been left behind due to illness and job destruction. People like me.

They were neither racists nor sexists. And they matter.

The Revolt of the Elites that began in 1980 is clearly over. The self described Masters of the Universe are what’s for dinner politically now.

What’s next for the faltering middle class remains to be seen. There’s little doubt some opportunistic trash will be drawn to the blood in the water, along with the patriots trying to serve the greater good.

There’s a Chinese quotation to the effect “may you live in interesting times” and we’re certainly doing that right now in the U.S. However, very few fans of the quotation realize it’s a curse rather than some sagacious saying.

At the global level, the reputation of the USA fell dramatically last night. Along the lines of what happened with the VW emissions scandal, but on a much larger scale.

Military empires are about fear. The rest of the world fears us less today.

In the short run that’s a bad thing for America and its allies. It’s a bad thing for rivals which have been peaceful solely out of fear of our military might. Like China, Iran and Russia.

And it’s a bad thing for our threatened allies like Japan, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine.

However, it could also be a good thing in the long run.

Why?

Because lasting peace in a nuclear age is not built on the fear created by the tip of a spear, but on fear of war itself.

We’ll see.

Change is on the march. Social media and the Internet are exposing the sins of the privileged few in ways not seen since the printing press was invented in 1440. It ended the clergy’s monopoly on the alleged word of God by making the bible available to non-clergy for the first time.

Social media, Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Internet are achieving the same thing right now with government control of information.

In sum, the Arab Spring has come to America and found its villains in a ruling class which has gone too far for too long. But just like our counterparts in Egypt, our desire for change at the top is still being hijacked by special interests.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, “the narrower the social pyramid the more unstable the society.” We simply cannot have a society in which two-thirds of the population are “losers,” just so the privileged assholes at the top can feel good about themselves.

Trading one set of privilege assholes for another is not the change people are clamoring for.

Hillary was never a champion of either women or the middle class. If she’d really been a feminist she would have stepped aside and pushed the principled Elizabeth Warren forward as the first female president. If she had cared about the faltering middle class as much she claimed at election time then global markets would not have tanked after her defeat.

What’s the real moral of the story?

The 1 Percent was blinded by their own fictitious narratives, by their need to be insulated from painful truths, and by the $10,000 couture smocks Clinton rubbed in the faces of working Americans while speaking about the sins of the rich and powerful.

To borrow a line from the South: “That dog won’t hunt.”

Anyone who uses data to gauge anything becomes a moron the minute they start gaming their own economic indicators, corporate earnings releases, and political polls to ignore unpleasant truths. As we have been doing for decades now in America to conceal our flaws.

Can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. Can you?

That’s why unemployment no longer measures unemployment, new home sales does not accurately reflect new home sales, job creation is not job creation, corporate earnings growth is not growth, and inflation is not inflation. The term “economy” is now just a code for multinational corporations. One that often goes up when working people are suffering the most.

They’ve all been twisted into lie machines that support the misleading narratives favored by the Rockefellers, Bloombergs and Murdochs of the world.

Case in point, the mythical 5 Percent unemployment rate. The actual ratio of Americans without a job is more like 40 Percent.

That kind of misleading nonsense is big part of the reason why the 1 Percent and their lackeys were flying blind in this election.

They hide behind gates, walls and security desks like modern-day Romanovs, Hohenzollerns and Bourbons to avoid the suffering their greed has wrought in a nation whose woods are filled with homeless people living in tents. Largely because the 1 Percent has off-shored so many American jobs to China and India to reduce corporate labor costs and boost profits.

I’ve got a hint for you and your buddies in the 1 Percent. You know those places you derisively refer to as “Flyover Country” and “Rustbelt?” That’s your country. Always was. Always will be.

What happens there matters. How do I know?

I live there. And I’m not a citizen of the world. I’m a citizen of the United States you establishment pukes are supposed to be leading. Rather than looting.

Remember?

As a liberal who has suffered mightily in recent years due to job destruction my feelings about this election are mixed. I quake at the specter of new Kristallnachts and pogroms, because I know poor and working class Jews like me historically pay for the sins of rich Jews in revolutionary times. Like the Bloombergs and Madoffs of Wall Street.

On the other hand, change is in the wind. And that’s preferable to the continued slow death of the faltering middle class I love, honor and cherish.

Bottom line: You can only take away so much from your fellow Americans. A smart man or woman would have known that, but not Hillary or Jeb and those like them.

As for Trump?

He’s just the little bird on the rhinocerous’ back. He’s not the rhino.

Not yet anyway.

The rhino is the faltering middle class. It’s really big, really angry, and totally capable of sweeping all before it once it gets everything moving in the same direction.

However, it’s eyesight is not so good. Those of us in traditional victim groups can only hope it goes for its tormentors on Wall Street and doesn’t turn on us instead.

Because divide and conquer is the 1 Percent game plan.

Always has been. Always will be.

They turn us on ourselves every chance they get and we fall for it over an

POPULAR CATEGORY

The Cynical Times is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news and satire organization devoted to the faltering middle class, which specializes in painful truths. It was founded in 2011 to expose the knowing lies and sins of omission of the Predatory 1 Percent, their political hookers in Washington, D.C., and the paid propagandists of the mainstream news media.